[RonaldSchleifer]

It’s interesting you mention the shopping site. I have found their site horrible ever since the beginning and only marginally better since done of their belabored efforts to polish some things. I feel like both WAS and the shopping UI/UX are dependent on an overarching common effect; your willingness to suffer in order to get the hit of addiction. On the shopping site it’s the relative speed and gratification of the purchase in addition to the Christmas like anticipation of package delivery, in AWS it’s the general, relatively best (note the intentional avoidance of “good”) in class overall outcome (a function that includes the universality of AWS in the industry); which both matter way more than everything else, even combined.

Think of an Amazon shopping competitor that has a great site UX and actually makes good recommendations (no, Amazon, I do not need 20 more variations on lightbulbs I just bought), the site UX and recommendations, among other things; would surely have to cumulatively far exceed the perceive value placed on the immediacy of AMZ logistics operation that can have you the thing you lust after on the same day sometimes.

I’m certain AMZ knows quite well, just as Google, FB, etc., they have a monopoly of Good Enough in core competencies to both maintain their monopoly and stave off or at least frustrate competitors through their monopolization of our minds. It’s a new type of monopoly, Mental Monopoly, suited for the Information Age abstracted from the physical world of goods.

It’s why we suffer through Amz, Aws, as well as put up with google and YouTube and fb and endless scrolling through rubbish on Netflix … they have a grip on our lazy mind because they’re all Good Enough and there is no one that is enforcing comptmltition in a manner that is appropriate for thevtech industry.

[AndrewKemendo]

The Amazon.com desktop homepage isn't meant to be anything more than a search bar and a billboard. Go look at it.

Now go look at amazon.com on a mobile browser. Very different but still focused on search and (effectively) ads.

Even different still is the Amazon mobile app. Again, prime focus on the search bar and big huge ads.

The reality is that Amazon wants you to use it as a search engine. They now beat Google for all product searches. Everything Amazon.com does basically tells you: "Hey, just use the search bar dummy."

So, whether it's being the top results in Google which they work super hard to be, or making the amazon front ends the place you start searching - they optimize their consumer UI's to focus on getting you to search.

[AnonymousPlanet]

I'm curious, could you point me at a shop that has a better UI? So far, all the other online shops I used so far (and that have a varied set of items) were either on par or much worse. Most of them were bog slow, search didn't work as expected, or some other aspect failed to work properly. Those that were on par were for specialised products.

[zabhi]

You can check https://www.flipkart.com/ or https://www.myntra.com/. Both belong the the same group. They are fast to load and feel very lite, in spite of being very client heavy.

[AnonymousPlanet]

Thank you! The first has sluggish loading pictures. But that's maybe because I'm not geographically within the target area.

Both feel more modern than Amazon, yes. I didn't test the checkout page and billing/shipping mechanics.

[jjeaff]

Https://Walmart.com

[AnonymousPlanet]

Thank you! This seems like it wants to show me too much at the same time. That makes loading assets slow. But it's more modern than Amazon's shop. Though I'm not sure if that is a good thing after comparing this and the examples in the sibling comment with Amazon's more pedestrian take.

[abledon]

Amazon aggressively A/B tests their shopping site -- if the UI was suboptimal, they wouldnt be showing it that way. so much information is crammed into one page. look at most sites in asia and it will be similar.

It seems to me that your complaints _are_ what lots of other people actually want to see, (someone saying: yes amazon, please DO show me 20 variations on lightbulbs after i just bought some because Im a shopaholic, i dont do much research and I'm one of the millions of people who click on google ads _all the time_ because i dont know how to go find what i need, the site has to SHOW me what i need)

[jrockway]

I think A/B testing requires A or B to actually be good. Imagine a data-driven restaurant that uses A/B testing to determine what customers want to eat. A is cockroaches. B is tarantulas. The data says that more customers prefer tarantulas! But they still go out of business because the steak next door is much better than either option.

[cthalupa]

>The data says that more customers prefer tarantulas! But they still go out of business because the steak next door is much better than either option.

This is where your analogy sort of falls apart. Amazon seems to be doing the opposite of going out of business to the steakhouse next door.

You can of course get good results out of a bad process, but this is usually not something that happens in a sustained manner over such a long period of time. Processes that result in positive effects for periods of years or decades are generally sound.